Monday, June 27, 2016

A Letter to PENNY DREADFUL Creator John Logan, From His Fans:

Dear Mr. Logan:

How could you? Do you not have more respect for your
audience than that? An audience that has been loyal to you every step of the
way? And what of the actors and the crew members who worked so hard for those
3+ years to bring your vision to life? Do you not have any respect for them? Do
you not have any respect for your own work?

I’m not a better writer than you, John. I know this. Yet I
can think of a good half-dozen scenarios in which PENNY DREADFUL could have
continued, and none of them would leave any of the dangling plotlines that your
peremptory season finale left us with. Please don’t bother trying to convince
us again that it was always your intention for PENNY DREADFUL to run for only
three seasons. You are insulting our collective intelligence. A brief web
search will uncover several documented instances of you making contradictory
statements concerning how long you initially intended the series to run and at
what point you made the decision to end it at three. Even without this corroborating
evidence, however, it is obvious your decision to end the series the way you
did, at the time you did, was, if not a last minute decision, at least a recent
one. Or, if the plan had been in your mind for any duration of time, the
sloppy, slipshod manner in which you managed the third season suggests that you
were already preoccupied with other projects, that you were simply “phoning it
in.”

Why introduce such a complex and fascinating character as Catriana, only to do nothing with her? Such a last-minute addition makes no
sense. Why introduce Henry Jekyll if you never planned to show us Edward Hyde?
What about those story points back in season one, the connection of the
vampires to ancient Egypt?
Why bring in Dracula, such a larger-than-life, scene-stealing, eclipsing
character, then do nothing with him? Are we really supposed to believe that he
would just shrug and walk away after Vanessa’s death? That he would not at the
very least have taken his revenge, vented his rage, upon Ethan and the others?
And what will he do next? There were so, so many loose ends, John. You are far
too talented a writer to leave a project so unfinished, and yet that is what
you did. Because it was always a part of your grand design? Hogwash. We know
you too well, John. You proved to us, over and over again, that you are better
than that. A second-rate hack might view such a flawed, contrived ending as
sufficient, but not a writer of your caliber.

(As an aside, yes, we will accept that your intention was
always to have Vanessa’s story end in such a way, and that particular sequence
was haunting and beautiful. It would have been hard, would be hard, for you to
top it. No complaints there, John. That particular ending you got perfectly
right. But you jumped ahead to it, didn’t you? Yes, you did. You cut right to
the grand finale at the expense of a hefty chunk of what should have been the
third act. PENNY DREADFUL wasn’t JUST Vanessa’s story, John. You seem to have
forgotten that.)

So stop lying to us, John. Your decision to end PENNY
DREADFUL in such a way was NOT always your intent. Why did you do it, then?

We’re smart enough to put the pieces together, John. You
have a new project in the works with Showtime. Bully for you. So you got bored
with PENNY DREADFUL and wanted to move on, and you felt proprietary enough over
the series to want to put the period in place yourself. If you cared that much,
though, why not take a little more time and end it properly? Another season, or
even a few additional episodes, would have sufficed. But you were in a hurry,
weren’t you, John? It’s obvious to us, John, that this was the case. Why? Were
you under pressure from the network to get busy on your new show? Was there a
financial incentive for you to do so? Or are you just a pampered, spoiled
genius who can afford to make such decisions based solely on whim, because you
know you’ve reached a status of success where no one will call you on it? Does
it even matter WHY you did it? Not to us, it doesn’t.

You betrayed us, John. You betrayed our trust in you.
Please, tell me why we should ever trust you again. Why should we ever become
emotionally invested in any show you oversee, any project you create, knowing
that you are subject to, at any moment, get bored and pull the plug, or get offered
a juicy new gig and decide to put a premature end to your current show, and
this without even bothering to tell us you are doing so until after the fact?
By waiting to let us find out that PENNY DREADFUL would end only when we saw
the two words THE END emblazoned on the screen, you not only cheated us, you
gave no us no advance notice, no chance to prepare ourselves. This is hardly
surprising. When one is doing wrong by another, he seldom informs his victim
ahead of time.

Make no mistake, John. You screwed us over. We know it and
you know it. By trying to claim otherwise you are adding insult to injury. You
screwed your fans. We won’t forget that, John. We won’t forgive it. Do you
care? I doubt it; not yet, anyway. In the future? Time will tell. But you may
rest assured, you are going forward from this point without us. You’ve lost us.
Your audience. Your faithful. Your Dreadfuls have turned on you, John. You have
turned your most ardent supporters and fans into, not enemies, exactly, but
people who will never believe in you again. You should be ashamed, John. You’ve
let us all down and you’ve let yourself down. Shame, I say.